For three mubones, voice, percussion, movement and projection. 2026.
“Avocado ready, eat now!” A little drawing of how to heat up a bun. Kalun's parents left him notes like this all through his childhood in Toronto, in their best English, on the backs of phone bills. He kept every one, more than fifty, without really knowing why. Years later his sibling recorded their parents talking about growing up poor in Hong Kong and moving to Canada, stories the kids had never heard.
Nobody in that house said “I love you.” It turns out they wrote it, over and over, about avocados. This piece is our way of reading the notes out loud.
The piece
One scene: a note shows four hand-drawn boxes labelled “latus romain,” “mixed vegie with egg tanfu,” “vegetable,” “dim sum.” A video shows the note being traced. As each box is drawn, Kirsten's voice follows the line of the pen, Sara uses the mubone to paint the drawing onto a screen, and the finished drawing becomes playable: the performers move through it, and their bodies scrub through the sounds, mixing their voices with Kalun's mother's.
Three at once
Before this, only one person could play mubone at a time. Here three of us do, and the system listens to how we're standing: close together, in a line, someone drifting off to the side. All of that changes what you hear. It's also the first time mubone felt like something we could teach.
It finishes a trilogy that follows Kalun from Hong Kong to Toronto to Montréal and gets more crowded as it goes: Garcia on his own (2021), Migrations as a duo (2023), and now this, with the whole gang.
Premiere
9 October 2026, Flux Festival, Chapelle des Hospitalières, Montréal, on a double bill with Liberté Anne & FROTAE ft. Stella Adjokê. Flux is co-presented by Innovations en concert, Le Vivier, the Canadian New Music Network and Québec Musiques Parallèles.
Credits
- Kalun Leung — composition, trombone, concept
- Travis West — creative technology, co-composition
- Bettina Szabó — choreography, performance
- Kirsten Voss — voice, mubone
- Sara Nigard Rosendal — percussion, mubone
- Pia Balthazar — outside eye
- Brandon Patitucci — photography
Press
- Rosalie Chrétien, “Festival Flux 2026 | Écouter autrement…,” atuvu.ca, 14 October 2026
- Michel Rondeau, review of the Flux concert, PAN M 360, October 2026
Thanks to
MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels), Innovations en concert, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.